Sporting goods include rackets, golf clubs, skis, snowboards, athletic footwear, padding and protective equipment, and/or other types of sports products known in the art. Sporting goods may be designed to provide a user with a competitive advantage, improve durability, enhance the user's comfort, or protect the user from being injured. The marketability of sporting goods may depend on how effective they are at providing such benefits. As such, manufacturers of sporting goods continually seek to improve the materials and designs used in the construction of their products.
While adding material to sporting goods may improve their ability to resist wear, absorb impacts, dampen vibrations, or perform other advantageous functions, it may also add bulk and weight to the sporting goods. The added bulk and weight may negate the advantages by increasing a user's discomfort, or hindering a user's movement or performance. Thus, sporting goods are often times constructed of lightweight, thin materials. However, if the materials are too thin or weak, they may lose their effectiveness, or may be easily damaged. A balance must be struck between these considerations.
One attempt to strike the proper balance involves the use of fiber-reinforced composite materials that include reinforcing fibers in resin material. Such materials have been used in rackets, for example. The use of these materials in a racket makes the racket light in weight, and gives it relatively high strength in the direction of tension of the fibers or laminate plane, as compared to other types of conventional rackets. However, these fiber-reinforced composite materials may have highly anisotropic properties, with the stiffness and strength in a direction at right angles to the laminate planes being extremely low compared with the stiffness and strength within the laminate planes. One reason for this is that the strength of the fibers may contribute little to the strength of the composite material in directions other than within the laminate planes. Rather, strength in those other directions may be dependent on the resin. Thus, even though the in-plane strength of the fiber-reinforced composite materials can be improved by changing or further reinforcing the reinforcing fibers, the strength in other directions, provided by the resin, may not be improved by making those changes. Thus, the resin-dependent strength may limit the overall strength of the fiber-reinforced composite material.
The present disclosure addresses at least some of the problems described above and other problems in existing sporting goods technology.